The present invention relates to transport apparatuses having a plurality of article transporting vehicles that travel on a path extending past a plurality of article transferring locations.
The above-described transport apparatus can be used, for example, in an automated warehouse. An improvement in the transport capacity can be achieved, for example, when a plurality of article transporting vehicles are led to travel back and forth on a linear path having two ends, so that the plurality of article transporting vehicles carry articles to a plurality of article transferring locations.
Such transport apparatuses are conventionally configured such that two article transporting vehicles are provided, wherein each of the two article transporting vehicles is provided with travel driving means for drivably running the article transporting vehicle and a vehicle-side controller for controlling the operation of the travel driving means, to control the driving and the stopping of the article transporting vehicle, and wherein the two drive-side controllers control the travel driving means while communicating information on, for example, a running status of the other article transporting vehicle, between themselves (see JP 2002-175117A, for example).
In the above-described conventional transport apparatus, the travel driving means operates while the drive-side controllers communicate information on, for example, the running status of their article transporting vehicles, and thus it is necessary to operate the travel driving means with consideration to the communications between the drive-side controllers.
More specifically, the travel driving means operates after the communications between the drive-side controllers, and thus a time lag for the time taken for the communications between the drive-side controllers is generated before the travel driving means operates. Therefore, it is necessary to manage the operation of the plurality of article transporting vehicles with consideration to this time lag.
For example, if managing the operation of the plurality of article transporting vehicles such that the vehicle-to-vehicle distance between the article handling vehicles is equal to or greater than a set vehicle-to-vehicle distance, then it is necessary to set the set vehicle-to-vehicle distance to be larger by a distance that is equivalent to the time lag taken for communications between the vehicle-side controllers, and thus there is a risk of a loss of transport capacity when articles cannot be transferred at the same time to two article transferring locations at which the article transporting vehicles are in proximity to each other.